JURY’S STATEMENTS ABOUT THE 2017 SHORTLISTED ARTISTS
As Jury members of this extraordinary and unique prize, we begin with an expression of our admiration and respect for all the 2017 shortlisted artists.
Tania El Khoury, Sethembile Msezane, Alexandra Pirici and The vacuum cleaner, your diverse range of experiences and practices – created across and between social, environmental and political contexts is exemplary. Your sophisticated work – whether created for public space, in collaboration with institutions, or as activism at the frontline of the refugee crisis or mental health services demonstrates that Live Art is a powerful platform for artists to talk about the urgent issues of our time. To ask audiences to re-think, to re-imagine, and to make demands.
Each of these four artists, whether creating work in South Africa, Europe, the Middle East or the UK, rigorously analyses and engages with their respective political landscapes to dig, to strip back, to provoke, to create a space for dissent and anger. Each creates work that is participatory, that fundamentally invites conversation – using different pathways to exchange, reflect and contest.
Collectively, their practice is testament to what Live Art can do – who it can speak for and with. People we don’t or can’t see in the public domain, voices we don’t hear or are misinterpreted or obscured in our culture.
While each of these artists creates aesthetically and formally very different works, the jury recognized a recurring and urgent project to address and contest the formal practice and memorialization, and of power. To explore the corporeality of memory. To ask who is remembered, why and how? And in turn, who is not?
Each of the artists uses intimacy and interaction as strategies to ask these and other burning issues of our time. While some draw on their own lived experiences as core material for their work, they all call on ethical research and collaborative models to create resonant truthful work.
They trust their audiences and are careful to create the conditions in which their audiences trust the work. All display extraordinary courage in the public realm. As the activist John Jordan would say their work is ‘not about politics it is politics’.
As a Jury, we’ve been delighted to be introduced to or get to understand more deeply each of these artists’ practice. It’s been a privilege and an honour to read the artists’ own reflections on their work offering precious insights into their process.
Sethembile Msezane’s work has a singular legible focus – to reinscribe black South African women into public space and history as a counterpoint to ‘official’ patriarchal, British colonial and Afrikaner nationalist representations in public sculpture and monuments. Her work, created through a series of live actions and tableaux in public space, extends to a series of photographic images – artifacts that in turn create a new visual language of self-representation and a repositioning of the place of black women in a nation’s history and political economy. It is courageous work and to be nominated at this stage of her career is testament to the strength of practice.
Alexandra Pirici’s work critiques the environment and impulses around the display of formal, traditional art and its physical contexts. Using the body as a vehicle to investigate time – past and present, she creates choreographic responses and interventions in galleries and public spaces. Her sensitivity to the protocols of public spaces as she intervenes in them engenders a delicate dialogue. Her live work is an interpretation or a re-inhabiting, of historical sensibility, and institutionalism and gives formal propriety to our sense of culture, expression and creativity. Her work critiques power and monumentalism directly – it is stripped back, unadorned and quiet.
The vacuum cleaner’s activist practice asks us to re-consider the efficacy of art itself – what can or should it do? What, as artists, are our social responsibilities now? There is an ethical question at the heart of this work – an ethics of engagement and responsibility. He uses his own experiences of precarious mental health as the point of departure for his work to engage with wider realities. Recently he his direct activist art operating outside the system shifted to collaborate with health service providers, their users and institutions to redesign ‘ideal’ spatial and aesthetic places for care. This engagement with the people at the centre of a wicked problem – as a means to shift old thinking and practice has had significant impact on individuals and institutional practice. In a world where mental health issues were until recently taboo, he has been on the right side of history – creating work and interventions that are simultaneously critical, playful and profound.
Tania El Khoury orchestrates live experiences in an exquisite relationship between content and form. She has a sophisticated and delicate relationship with the individuals and communities touched or terrorized by violent, politically driven unrest. She works with people’s stories to share/restore the voice of individuals and communities. Her relationships with the subjects of her work, her trusted collaborators – the bereaved or the displaced, are deeply ethical and inclusive. Tania in turn invests enormous generosity and trust in her audiences. Whether hearing from the dead as we nestle into dirt or having our inner arm marked with journeys unimaginable to most, this artist orchestrates experiences that are intimate, visceral and sensory. Where liveness is embodied through the audience experience.
So, Alexandra, James, Sethembile and Tania, the job of selecting a single winner has been incredibly hard. Your work is astonishing. It is brave and intelligent, connected to the contemporary world, finding new forms, new collaborators and audiences, new sites and contexts for intervention.
After a lot of discussion, a single winner has emerged. For making artworks on the right side of history, that seek to mark us with the experiences of others, lightly but nevertheless indelibly, for creating intimate, emotional and ethical live experiences the 2017 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art goes to Tania El Khoury.
The sensitivity of Tania’s work in orchestrating audience experience is extraordinary. It stays with us, is sometimes literally written onto us. She has foregrounded some of the burning questions of our time by creating resonant experiences that generate conversation and exchange. She creates acts of remembering, of marking, of ourselves in the position of others.
Tania says in her artist statement that while activism knows its endpoint, a live artist, does not –suggesting her process is open-ended and exploratory. We congratulate her on her detailed exploration and thank her for the works created so far. This award will facilitate further work and we look forward to seeing it.
In closing, the Jury members – Lois Keidan, River Lin and Fiona Winning would like to congratulate all the shortlisted artists Sethembile Msezane, Alexandra Pirici, The vacuum cleaner and Tania El Khoury. Your practice is urgently needed, deeply appreciated by this jury, and rightfully celebrated around the world.
We also sincerely thank both the ANTI Festival and the Saastamoinen Foundation for their vision and ongoing support in creating this unique international Prize for Live Art. In this, its fourth year, we can see the increased visibility of both award winners and shortlisted artists. As a sector, we sincerely thank you for that. Art making is a precarious existence, so recognition backed up with real support is immensely appreciated by live artists and their audiences. Thank you.
Fiona Winning (chair)
Lois Keidan
River Lin